REACTION TO THE FRENCH COLONIZATION OF INDO-CHINA

creased the feeling of self-confidence and independence on the part
of colonials and natives alike. Sarraut's liberal policy stimulated native
ambitions: workers and soldiers returning from France brought with
them new ideas and influences. The tempo of the colony's development
was, in consequence, enormously accelerated, and very soon evidence
of this forced growth became apparent. Trends and defects which
might otherwise have made themselves felt only slowly and uncer-
tainly sprang up overnight and demanded immediate solutions.

The colony's relations with its former master, China, have ever been
the touchstone of its metamorphoses. In 1919 a fishwives' street brawl
developed into an Annamite boycott of the Chinese. Its ineffectuality
was due to the Chinese control of the economic situation, not to any
lack of driving emotions on the part of the Annamites, for whom the
boycott assumed almost national proportions. This negative form of
nationalism was supplemented three years later by a very positive ele-
ment from the same source—communism a la Cantonaise. Although
Annamite wartime workers had been influenced by French communistic
ideas, communism in its pure form has little appeal for a people so in
love with the soil. Regionalism is another factor which has militated
against its spread, but communism grafted on to post-War nationalism
took root in Indo-China with amazing rapidity.

Tonkin and North Annam, by their historical development, economic
setting^, and proximity to China, are the regions naturally marked out
for nationalism's finest flowering. Chinese culture is most deeply-
rooted and self-conscious in the North. The long struggle of the Macs,
Les, Nguyens, and Taysons has bred in the Tonkinese a contempt for
their Southern compatriots. Hue was far away, and the viceroy in
Tonkin did not enjoy his master's religious authority. These differences
in outlook between the different Annamite countries have been aggra-
vated by the varied administrative policies of the French. Nationalism,
therefore, has taken a different form in each Annamite country: in
Cochin-China it has become an electoral struggle in the worst demagogic
taste: in Annam it is dynastic: and in Tonkin primarily economic and
cultural. Unlike the Japanese Mikado the Occidentalized Emperor
Bao Dai is not the focus of the national movement—he is regarded as
too useless and expensive—except in Annam, where an artificial loyalty
has been created among those Annamites dependent on Court patronage.
The peasant's awed veneration for the sacred invisible Emperor has
been largely dissipated by Ms prolonged residence in France, and by
seeing him drive his own car daily out to the golf links or tennis courts.

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